Neuroscientist Sara Lazar, of Mass General and Harvard Medical School, started studying meditation by accident. She sustained running injuries training for the Boston Marathon, and her physical therapist told her to stretch. So Lazar took up yoga.

"The yoga teacher made all sorts of claims, that yoga would increase your compassion and open your heart," said Lazar. "And I'd think, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here to stretch.' But I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others' points of view."

Image: A meditation class at Havas advertising agency in New York City. Sarah Jacobs/Business Insider 

As the 2020 presidential race heats up in the United States, Democratic candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are calling for an overhaul of America's economic and financial policies for the sake of the country's future. Also joining the conversation: hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio.

Dalio is the founder and co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, the Connecticut firm with $160 billion in assets under management. In a LinkedIn post published Thursday, he called for a reformation of capitalism.

Image: 7 November 2018; Ray Dalio, Founder, Co-Chief Investment Officer & Co-Chairman, Bridgewater Associates on the Forum Stage during day two of Web Summit 2018 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Harry Murphy/Web Summit via Sportsfile - wikipedia.com

In venture, there are two tables, and VCs are the go-between.

There’s one where VCs listen to founders hawk their shares and make deals to gain purchase in growing companies, all for a cut of the eventual upside.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

And then there’s the table where venture capitalists negotiate subscription agreements with limited partners—the institutional money managers and (ultra) high-net-worth folks who, more often than not, are simply seeking (if not always achieving) asymmetric returns on capital via alternative asset classes, like equity stakes in high-growth private companies.

Image: https://news.crunchbase.com

The Cold War that followed World War II as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for global dominance changed the world forever, and the technology from the space race continues to influence everyday life. That race began in earnest in the 1950s as both nations feverishly developed nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to carry them, according to Air Force Global Strike. The resulting advancements in rocket technology enabled the early exploration of space, leading up to the Soviet Union successfully orbiting the first artificial satellite in 1957 and putting the first human in orbit in 1961. The competition peaked when the United States successfully landed the first humans on the moon in 1969. The legacy of the Cold War and the early space race is not just about global tension and conflict: It also yielded the birth of the modern technological age.

Circular Cities, you say? Staff reporter 9th April 2019 circular economy Photo by Jaël Vallée on Unsplash That’s certainly the direction of travel – and the Circular Cities conference intends to accelerate the journey.

Taking place on 16 May in Scotland House, Brussels, the theme: ‘innovating to tackle plastic waste’ focuses on one of the key bottle necks that city stakeholders and innovators need to overcome to make circular urban environments the norm.

Image: Photo by Jaël Vallée on Unsplash

History indicates that major technological changes can take about half a century to go from the first lab drawings to society. Alan Turing first proposed the Turing machine laying the foundations of computation in 1936; the first general-purpose “Turing-complete” system was built in 1945; and “The Computer” was only named “Machine of the Year” by Time in 1982, about half a century later. The foundations of the internet were laid out in the 1960s, but consumers did not get to broadly use and benefit from it until the mid-to-late 1990s.

A vibrant innovation ecosystem involves numerous complementary and accretive elements that need to work together in tandem and harmony to be successful.

Having been involved in numerous ecosystems globally – especially in the Silicon Valley and India – I have seen some common themes.

Academia

Usually the bedrock of a lot of innovation activity – think Stanford, Berkeley and CMU West in the Silicon Valley, IITs and IIMs/ISB in India, Harvard and MIT in Boston and you get the picture. A lot of groundbreaking innovation either originates or gets supported directly by these institutions or by graduates from these highly pedigreed colleges. Add to the fact that startups in these proximities can easily hire smart interns from these institutions, and you have a wonderful pool of technology talent literally at your doorstep.

Image: https://yourstory.com

Hurdles which are associated with the journey of entrepreneurship deter many people even before the start of the promising ideas. Several startup owners do feel how their journey can lead them towards the desired goal, what can they do to make it successful and what they should have done in the past are a few things that keep on discouraging a beginner before the start of the journey.

Download the PDF

Of late, entrepreneurship has become a rather popular option for the masses. Due to which we have a fairly good idea of what it takes to become an entrepreneur. Self-belief and persistence definitely helps you in becoming an entrepreneur. However, in today’s competitive day and age, being just an entrepreneur is not enough- it takes a visionary leader to survive. As the saying goes- when the going gets tough, only the tough get going. Here are 5 skills that every entrepreneur needs, to become a visionary leader.

Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Muffet McGraw is deeply loved, appreciated and respected here in South Bend not chiefly because she has ably coached her teams to two national championships but because of the principled and courageous leadership she demonstrated at a Final Four news conference Thursday in Tampa.

Image: Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw cuts down the net after defeating Stanford 84-68 in a regional championship game in the NCAA women's college basketball tournament on April 1, 2019, in Chicago. (Nam Y. Huh/AP)

If there’s one thing we’ve learned while promoting crowdfunding campaigns, it’s that every campaign is unique in its own way. There’s no hard and fast rule to promote a campaign to make it successful overnight. Every time you launch a campaign, you have to go through the motions. We do prefer to follow a set of rules for images and campaign presentation in general, but what’s going to work best will vary for every campaign.

The majority of business professionals I meet these days accept that we are now deep in the digital age, where mountains of data are gathered on everything we do, online and offline. Yet most executives are struggling with how to harness this data with artificial intelligence and machine learning, and use it to hone their intuition and improve their business leadership.

Silicon Valley is known as the center of tech and innovation, but people in the industry are noticing that its dominance is starting to slip.

A recent survey of 300 tech employees in Silicon Valley found that 49% said they expected a region outside the San Francisco Bay Area to emerge as a center of innovation. A report on the survey, compiled by the Brunswick Group, said that most of the tech workers — 74% — said they expected China to become more of a competitive threat to Silicon Valley's tight grip on the tech industry in the next five years.

Image: HBO

In 2018, 50 percent of the top venture capital-funded companies in Kansas City got their start with early-stage investment programs that emerged after 2012, according to We Create KC 2019, KCSourceLink’s sixth annual state of entrepreneurship report.

“That high percentage shows us how important these early-stage investment programs are to our entrepreneurs and our ecosystem,” said Maria Meyers, founder of KCSourceLink, and executive director of the University of Missouri–Kansas City Innovation Center, of which KCSourceLink is a program.

Image: https://www.startlandnews.com

Investors in digital health have been opening their wallets in recent years, with the promise that the coming together of devices, algorithms and consumers' growing obsession with personal health data will translate into big business.

They're finally poised to see some of the rewards, as the IPO market appears ready to crack open.

Image: Livongo's founder and executive chairman Glen Tullman - https://www.cnbc.com

The American higher education system has always been one yearned by the world and has brought about the discoveries that contributed to innovations leading to products that enhanced the societal needs. Universities are capable of producing the base knowledge (discovery) used in the design of new products (innovation). However, they are dependent on organisation to take these inventions and turn them into actual commodities. This course of action has worked well over time, however, there are opportunities to widen the level, number and depth of university-industry collaborations and enhance the development of new products.

As an entrepreneur, it’s your responsibility to plan how you’re going to spend your time. You can watch binge-watch Netflix all day, but that’s most likely not the best use of your time. Additionally, you also have to set boundaries and keep yourself motivated day-in-and-out. In some way -- you want to find a direction to follow to gain that balance between work and your personal life.

The Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) is Taiwan’s agency for driving forward scientific and technological innovation, a major pillar of the country’s plans for economic growth. In the age of the knowledge-based economy, science and technology has become a key driver of growth and national progress for Taiwan.

As such, in March 2014, the National Science Council (NSC), which was originally established in February 1959, was reorganised into the Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) with a new structure designed to strengthen the integration of academic research and industrial development.

It’s easy to say yes and hard to say no. Anyone who has children knows how effortless it is for kids to learn the word "no."  They love to say it—all the time! So, it's curious that as we get older, the word “no” becomes a distant memory and "yes" is the order of the day.